back to top
Home Blog

Overview

0
Lesson Progress
0% Complete

There are 29 states and Washington, D.C. that have now passed parity laws for telemedicine. And this number will keep going up! Eight additional states currently have proposed parity laws on the table. Plus, commercial payers are increasingly motivated to cover telemedicine anyway, because of the cost-savings it can bring. 

Here’s the list of states that currently have a parity law in place: 

Arizona 
Arkansas 
California 
Colorado 
Connecticut 
Delaware 
Georgia 
Hawaii 
Indiana 
Kentucky 
Louisiana 
Maine 
Maryland 
Michigan 
Minnesota 
Mississippi 
Missouri 
Montana 
Nevada 
New Hampshire 
New Mexico 
New York 
Oklahoma 
Oregon 
Tennessee 
Texas 
Vermont 
Virginia 
Washington 
Washington, D.C.

All parity laws mandate coverage for live video telemedicine, but only some also require payers to cover store-and-forward telemedicine. Some of the parity laws also have specific restrictions and exclusions. Make sure to visit the ATA website to review the parity law in your state.

 The major health insurance companies—Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Humana, and United Healthcare—all offer some form of coverage for telemedicine. Some of these plans might say they cover telemedicine but they may only reimburse for telemedicine services on certain patient policies. For instance, a patient with a “gold policy” might have coverage for telemedicine, while a patient with a “bronze policy” may have telemedicine care listed as an excluded service. In most cases, private payers seem to reimburse at the same rate as the comparable in-person service.